[ale] Good cheap tape drive? (was Re: [ale] Fullfilesystembackup to CD-R)

[Charles Shapiro]

Geez, I just bought a couple of used SCSI DAT drive for $10 ea last
month from Chris Farris. I sold the other one though. Mine plugged in
and worked like a champ on 2.2 after I spent $17 on the right cable.
Only 2:4 gigs, but all my partitions are sized to 2G anyways. It's
spectacularly slow over my 10 MB/sec network -- takes something like 4
hours to back up 2 GB from an NFS mount. But why should I care? I just
turn the machinery on and go to bed.  Tapes run $5 or so apiece.

Apparently DAT drives have some kind of magic "media sensing" system on
them, so larger tapes will not work on smaller drives. But the tapes are
widely available, even at places like Office Depot.The there clerks
don't generally understand you and have to call the manager over to
interpret, but wotthehell.

-- CHS
On Fri, 2002-07-12 at 10:30, Stuffed Crust wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 08:57:22AM -0400, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > I have and use and SWEAR BY the Ecrix drives. They are less than DLT
> > drives, and store more than most DAT drives. With an uncompressed media
> > size of 33G and a backup/restore rate of 3-6MB/s (depending on
> > compression) it is a reasonably priced and sized alternative to the too
> > small DAT and Travan and the outrageous DLT. 
> 
> If anyone's interested, I have something like 50 of those 33gig tapes.
> Used, but AFAIK they're all good as they were in active rotation when
> Incanta folded.
> 
> Call it part of my severence package.  :)  (The VCs missed a few things
> in their firesale.. and apparently ignored all of the tapes...)
> 
> I just can't justify spending $600 on a tape drive right now..
> 
>  - Pizza
> -- 
> Solomon Peachy                                   pizza at f*cktheusers.org
> I'm not broke, but I'm badly bent.                         ICQ #1318344
> Patience comes to those who wait.                         Melbourne, FL


---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.